Engadget has follow-ups to comments recently attributed to Ben Krasnow about plans for Steam hardware. Ben says he was misquoted (or mistranslated) and that he did not confirm Linux support and he does not think they will be showing off anything of the sort this year as reported (thanks HARDOCP). Meanwhile, there's an interview with Valve's Gabe Newell on The Verge where the Valve honcho talks of how they are working with many hardware partners on "Good, Better," or "Best" boxes for playing Steam games, and also goes ahead and says they will be releasing Linux-based "Steam boxes," among other things, also discussing their interest in low-latency controllers, biometric controllers, and other cutting edge-ness. This includes much discussion of open versus closed systems.

Beamer wrote on Jan 9, 2013, 09:52:1) Valve has captured the hardcore PC market. Captured. Exhausted, even. How is Steam supposed to grow? Nearly every game is released on Steam, and I think we all agree that Steam is probably doing more revenue than B&M at this point. So where is Steam supposed to grow? How do you grow when your market share is already monumentally larger than the next guy?

They should ask Balmer! I'm sure he'd recommend that they release Steam 8 with a shitty UI which is utterly unsuitable to 99% of their existing customer base in the hopes of capturing a few percent from a different market which is already sewn up by one of their main competitors.

Then, failing that, he'd say they need to release the Steambox, but release the totally worthless, shitty version first, so that everyone vomits inside their mouth a little bit at the sight of it, and completely forgets all about it by the time the actual product comes to market.